Overview

Welcome to the NuGet Docs. As the name implies, this site contains all the information that you will need to get up and running with NuGet, whether you are new to NuGet and need information for installing and managing packages, whether you are a seasoned contributor to one of the NuGet projects, or whether you are at some point in between.

Based on the amount and diversity of content, the site has been organized into 3 top level content groups based on the top 3 types of ways in which people tend to experience NuGet: as a package consumer, a package creator, or a project contributor. Please select one of these options to begin exploring the related body of content.

Finally, please note that this site itself is an open source project, and contains the wealth of information that it does because people like you have contributed to it. If you find any information that is incorrect on the site, or if there is a topic that you believe should be added to the site, please visit our GitHub repository and either file an issue on the issue tracker or, better yet, send us a pull request and contribute your knowledge to the rest of the NuGet community.

Latest Release: 3.0

NuGet 3.0 was released on July 20, 2015 as part of the Visual Studio 2015 release. This release culminates more than nine months of fixes, performance research, and improvements. This version is only available with Visual Studio 2015.

With the 3.0 release, we implemented the new NuGet 3.0 protocol to help streamline search and deliver packages faster. We have integrated a number of fixes and performance tunings into the Visual Studio UI and Powershell clients to improve your experience.

Latest Release for Visual Studio 2013: 2.8.6

Consume

Package consumption is far and away the most common type of activity for NuGet users. This section of NuGet documentation provides everything needed to get started with installing and using NuGet to install and manage packages in a project.

Topics range from installing NuGet to using the different client tools to using the package restore workflow.

Create

After having built projects that use NuGet packages for different pieces of functionality, many users wish to componentize their own projects as NuGet packages and distribute them, either interally to their organziation or publically on the NuGet gallery. This process of using components to build new components is where the true power of NuGet packages can be seen.

Topics in this section range from creating packages with the nuget.exe command to leveraging NuGet's package metadata format and package structure conventions to publishing a package to an online gallery.

Contribute

As an open-source project, NuGet's success is largely dependent on the support of its users. There are several different facets of the NuGet project, and several different ways that you can contribute to each of them.

This section walks through those different methods of contribution. Additionally, for code contribution, there are also specific guidelines for coding, branching structure, setting up a development environment, and writing and running tests.